'The Old Cape House' - Brewster woman's 1st novel

Thursday

Mar 13, 2014 at 5:19 PMMar 17, 2014 at 1:23 PM

Imagine digging in your cozy backyard in Brewster and finding an ancient root cellar, and when you plumb its depths, gold coins in a chest and a baby skull and mystery linked to a notorious Cape Cod pirate.

That's just what Barbara Struna did.

Staff Reporter

Imagine digging in your cozy backyard in Brewster and finding an ancient root cellar, and when you plumb its depths, gold coins in a chest and a baby skull and mystery linked to a notorious Cape Cod pirate.

That’s just what Barbara Struna did.

No, not turn up a baby’s skull and a sack of doubloons – that’s what she imagined after shoveling into an odd pattern of red bricks 10 inches beneath the soil behind her barn in Brewster at “The Old Cape House,” the title of her first historical novel. It was published Oct. 28, by Booktrope of Seattle. The old house on the cover, cheerfully lit from the inside, is the one she shares with her husband Tim, who painted the original watercolor.

“It has alternating chapters that go back and forth and tell the story of two women from different eras and they solve a mystery going back 300 years,” Struna told an audience at Brewster Ladies Library on March 4. “I wrote it because I love history and I also like to tell a good story.”

As the hometown of so many sea captains Brewster is an ideal setting for thrilling historical adventures. Sally Gunning has penned successful page turners such as “The Rebellion of Jane Clarke,” “Bound” and “The Widow’s War,” all set in the village of Satucket, an old name for Brewster.

Struna also found the town a fit subject for fiction, but it took her awhile to get to it. The couple moved here from Ohio 27 years ago and founded Struna Galleries in Brewster (their daughter Heather owns Struna Gallery in Chatham). She planned to write but three daughters kept her busy and then two more children in her 40s ensured that her authorial dreams would have to wait. But she did find time to research her house, built in 1880.

“I looked for free things to do,” Struna explained. “We had two acres. I made paths and found bottles, shards of pottery, old toys. We unearthed an old Model T with wooden spokes and decided to keep it and made paths around it. I walked the fire roads, old railroad beds, where old villages were gone. I walked the bayside beaches and found beach glass and Tim even found pipe stems near McMillan Wharf.”

But her first novel was inspired when she decided to remove some of the grass in the yard and dug down.

“I found a layer of bricks. What could it be underneath it?” she wondered. “It wasn’t anything, and I used the bricks in my garden but I filed it in the back of my mind. Then I went to the Whydah Museum (in Provincetown).”

The Whydah was Sam Bellamy’s ship, wrecked off Wellfleet in 1717. Maria Hallett was his putative Cape Cod love, left with child when he last sailed away.

“There’s no record of her except in legend,” Struna reported. “So I decided I’m going to write her a new story. I walked the beaches in winter and thought about how many characters I’d have, working through the plot, and got five chapters down. I felt I needed more.”

She researched how people traveled on the old portions of Route 6A, what Maria Hallett might have seen walking from Eastham to Brewster (or North Harwich as it was then known).

“I found the Penny House Inn in Eastham. The inn is still there across from the driving range,” Struna said. “I researched the clothing. Their purse was a basket. I studied early open hearth cooking, seafood chowder and stews. There was no sugar; they used molasses and maple syrup. There was no insulation. They stuffed rags between the boards.”

She located parts of the beach in front of Ocean Edge where blocks of peat had been cut to burn for heat. The old wagon tracks were still visible.

Struna bundled all of that and signed up for a Nauset Adult Education course on writing taught by Nicola Burnell for two years.

“She helped me turn five chapters into 59 chapters,” Struna said. “And then we formed a writing group and met for five years.”

Burnell is the book’s editor. Ten of the group members read the manuscript. It was rewritten and submitted ultimately to 54 publishers who rejected it.

“Then I got offered a contract by a publishing house in Seattle,” Struna noted. “My advice is if you have dream never give up on it. I’ve kept a journal since I was 11. I’ve always told stories to my kids. Life just got in the way of actually sitting down to write 86,000 words.”

The novel took its final shape with modern day Nancy Caldwell, who moves to the Cape from Ohio with her artist husband and four kids to open an art gallery (who’s that character based on, we wonder?) and Maria Hallett’s forgotten tale.

“I write to music. I can’t have quiet. For one scene in the book I listened to one song over and over – it puts me in the mood where I get inspiration,” she reflected.

She’s inspired enough that her second novel, “The Old Cape Teapot” is nearly complete and work has begun on “The Old Cape Playhouse.”